Late in 1945, officials in the U.S. government were pondering the lessons of the recently concluded wars with Germany and Japan. It is no surprise that the principal concern of policymakers was to prevent circumstances arising that would again imperil the nation and its ever-increasing interests abroad. From the Allied perspective, preventing the resurgence of German and Japanese imperialism required a prolonged military occupation. Together with a view toward deterring other military threats to U.S. power, the consequence was the building-up of a vast peacetime military apparatus, what President Eisenhower termed a “military-industrial complex,” for the first time in U.S. history. At this same time, the Librarian of Congress, Luther Harris Evans, argued that American security and hegemony demanded another kind of national commitment as well, to the acquisition and assembling of data throughout the world. In his words:

Historians confront numerous difficulties while doing research on Central Asia, particularly concerning the contemporary period. Historical developments in the relations between Iran and Central Asia, especially following the rise of the Soviet Union, have led to the creation of high walls separating Iran from those countries, and have made research and information exchange impossible. Historical sources for this period are scarce and inaccessible, and researchers cannot easily access the little that exists in the form of manuscripts kept in the archives of Iranian libraries. Moreover, the writers of the Qajar period have dealt with only a very small sample of the events that took place in that part of the world, and then mostly with those occurring along the Iranian borders. Thus, they reveal little about developments inside Transoxiana.